Gain Job Experience for Freelance Fashion Design Jobs

Freelance fashion design is a demanding career. To succeed, you need job experience and a lot of it.

Types of Job Experience

When you’re starting out, you need to learn the basics. The best way to get job experience for freelance fashion design is to develop your skills based on your training.

Types of jobs include these:

Working for designers in entry-level or part-time jobs. These jobs can be in assembly, design drafting and other fundamental areas. This can involve a lot of backroom work, but it’s the real thing in terms of actual product creation.

Sales jobs. These may not look like design work, but if you want to see the business realities of fashion design, this is where you need to be.

Tailoring. This is some of the most valuable experience you can possibly get. Tailors are experts in creation of just about everything in fashion. They’re also meticulous, and you’ll learn a lot about the technical side of fashion design. This is excellent skills development, and you’ll find that any form of creative work you want to do becomes a lot simpler.

Internships. These are easy to find, and paid or not, they’re very good training. You get guidance in a very wide range of areas of design and production, and you will be able to use all of these skills as a freelancer.

Graphics and fashion design. If you’ve done the basic training for fashion graphics, you’ll appreciate how important this type of experience can be. It gives you very thorough, market-standard experience in presentation, advertising and the actual design itself. Graphics and fashion design are inseparable, and if you’re looking to create “the look,” you’ll be doing sketches and remembering your graphic training.

Apprenticeships: These aren’t quite the same things as internships. They’re traineeships, but they’re also highly structured training in specific fields. These are resume builders, and you also get professional guidance for a longer period than internships, which may be for relatively short periods.

Developing Your Fashion Design Job Experience

The next stage of your job experience is developing and building your own personal portfolio. This is also fun, and your creative skills will have received a supercharge from the experience you’ve had. The new portfolio, your references and your improved skills will give you a huge advantage as a freelance fashion designer.

In practice, successful freelance fashion designers have experience in nearly all of these areas. They can design, assemble and present their own fashions. They also pick up a lot of business experience, and that is absolutely priceless. Fashion design is a demanding business, as well as a creative challenge, and these early types of job experience really do cover all aspects of the business.